I have a hard drive that died as i was just installing another drive to make a back up. How ironic is that ? The drive will no longer spin. It does not do any clicking noise which I know is something some do when there is a head crash So my guess and the one of a Nashville studio tech is that there was a power failure on the drive that lead to the drive not spining at all.
The Bios kindda recognizes it, but windows XP does not. So, I contacted Western Digital (the manufacturer) for tech support. They recomended sending the drive to a hard Disk recovery place.
Their recovery price range goes from $700 to $3000 which I know it may be pricey but I am willing to pay so I can get some track I had there back.
Has anyone ever send their drive to such places? if so, did it work? W. Digital has partnerships with few companies and they claI'm they can get the stuff back in %95 of the cases including fire, water, and severe damage. is that True? Any comments are appreciated.
thanks
Jose Arbelaez
Sound Eng.
Nashville, TN
PD: sry about the long msg, but I wanted to be as detailed as possible.
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Yes, data can be recovered. I had a drive here at work that cra
Yes, data can be recovered. I had a drive here at work that crashed (fortunately it was still spinning though). It lost the coding that the computer needs to recognize it. I bought a $70 program, and was able to recover every bit of data, but it took hours for it pull it off the drive.
Are you running PC or mac?
The name of the program was "Get Data Back".
Hope this helps...
Aaron
Recovery depends on several things. Was the drive a FAT32 or N
Recovery depends on several things.
Was the drive a FAT32 or NTFS? NTFS is easier to recover.
Is the drive still made? If so, then they can sometimes swap the logic part, if that is what fried.
How big is the file? Larger files are harder to recover, as someone else mentioned the size of audio files and how they span.
I had a similar situation happen to me, and recovery was impossible, because when the drive did spin up, it turned out that it was spinning at irregular speeds - this included read and writes so the data wasn't reliable at all.
Since then, I've began an regiment of changing out my back-up and audio drive once every year. This might seem extreme, but the cost of a couple new hard drives every year is relatively cheap to the time/cost of recovery as you're finding out.
Before you do that take the drive out and GENTLY tap it on a tab
Before you do that take the drive out and GENTLY tap it on a table top or other hard surface on on of the corners, PLEASE DO THIS GENTLY. You can also put it on the table top and spin it to do the same thing. Sometimes it is only that the bearings have seized for lack of lubrication and this maybe all they need to start spinning again. It has worked on a number of drives for me when there was no other solution. Put it back in the computer and hopefully it will spin up if it does get it all transfered right then as you may not have a second chance. I did this with a drive on my Mac about 90 days ago and after transfering all the files I just left it in the Mac and it has been working great ever since. There are no files on it but periodically I transfer something into it and back off to see how well it is doing and it has been running for about 3 months and so far no problems but I would not suggest you try it with your drive for long term storage.
As to sending drives back for recovery. With audio files they may not be that lucky. Audio files are long files that go from sector or sector and take up a fair amount of disk space so even though they can recover parts of it (maybe up to 95%) you are still maybe left with holes or unplayable sections in the file. The chances of them being able to recover the whole file intact may not be that great. $3,000.00 sounds like a lot of money.....! I assume the material is irreplaceable?